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On Thursday, April 14, our department brought poet Jonathan Fink to the elegant setting of the ballroom of The Grace Museum during an ArtWalk evening.

Upwards of 100 people attended, including five entrants in the “Dress as Your Favorite Poet” costume contest. (The winner was “Sylvia Path”.)

Following the seductive acoustic guitar playing of veteran musician Dan Mitchell (ACU Dept. of Music), Jonathan took to the podium and immediately wowed the audience with a reading of his long poem “The Sea of Galilee.”

This poem, which appeared originally in The New England Review, traces the history of the famous painting by Rembrandt from the moment paint is brushed on canvas to centuries later when it is slashed in its frame by thieves, rolled up, and stolen from a Boston Museum (to this day the painting remains unrecovered).

It was a perfect instance of Fink’s method of focusing his poems on less well-known historical events or seeing familiar ones from a new perspective. An example of the latter was his reading of “The Prodigal Son,” a poem which imagines what the story would have been like if it told of the women who surely must have been present at the time in the form of a mother, sisters, and others.

The evening concluded with poems from Fink’s sequence looking at the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City. Those poems were augmented with archival black and white photos projected on a screen.

Following a packed special poetry chapel, a lunch with graduate students, and a class session on revising one’s prose, the evening reading was a perfect capper to this celebration of National Poetry Month spent in the presence of a stellar poet.